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lee1 writes "The US is preserving the last remaining known strains of smallpox in case they are needed to develop bio-warfare 'countermeasures' and as a hedge against possible outbreaks in a population with no natural immunity. 451 specimens are stored in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control, and 120 strains at the Russian Vector laboratory in Siberia. Meanwhile, the government has contracted to pay almost $3 billion to procure 14 million smallpox vaccination doses."

First of all, if you read the GPs wiki link, it would seem that the spread of smallpox via infected blankets is unlikely, but not impossible. (Even by your own claim, a 48 hour infection window hardly makes this impossible.)

But more importantly, even if it were impossible, as the article states, "while it is certain that these British soldiers attempted to intentionally infect Indians with smallpox, it is uncertain whether or not their attempt was successful." Being that there was clearly the intent to

I had a history book in college that was ~6months old at the time, several revisions in and had numerous awards. It had a section dedicated entirely to talking about how the Europeans purposefully spread smallpox and wiped out entire villages. It was covered under a chapter like "The Beginning of Biological Warfare". My teacher with a PHD in history also talked about it as fact. Well, neither the book nor my teacher specifically said blankets were used, but they both said smallpox was spread and it devastat

That is why those devils the British don't have it!Man the level of shear paranoia is just to the point of disgusting. Please run away to a place where none can find you and you are free of from evil cell towers, wifi, Aluminum in your deodorant and Autism causing vacines.First it is at the CDC and not at the Military bio warfare center. The US has long given up biological weapons because they frankly suck from a military point of view. They take too long to act, and hard to control, and are not very easy t

Nope. Personally, I'd say spend money to have the smallpox vaccine recipe somewhere, but not to stockpile vaccines for a known dead virus. If you're concerned about Al Qaeda using smallpox as a weapon, just immunize everybody that needs it NOW. Anybody older than 35 or so (what, no birthers challenging the President's old enough to serve?) SHOULD already be vaccinated; my brother is 41 and he got the shot but I am 31 and did not.

The odds of them using smallpox as a weapon are too low to risk vaccinating everyone. The vaccination program would harm far more people. I don't mean that in a crazy autism way, I mean from bad reactions to the vaccine. Every vaccine has a rate at which these occur and we can compare that to the risks Al Qaeda poses. Since Al Qaeda has so far in the last 50 years killed less people in the USA than farm animals and they show no sign of getting stronger we can probably forgo the vaccinations for now.

While smallpox is undeniably nasty, it is nowhere near lethal enough to make a decent weapon, and the vaccine is well understood and readily manufactured.

The counter-example of what happened to the Native Americans upon contact with European explorers is an unfortunate - and inevitable - side effect arising out of the fact that smallpox was unknown in the New World and so none of the Native American population had evolved defenses against it like Europeans had.

I *have* RTFA, and I don't see where the sentence "Meanwhile, the government has contracted to pay almost $3 billion to procure 14 million smallpox vaccination doses." comes from. How much time do you need to produce the vaccine from the virus? Is it some kind of future pledge? Because otherwise maybe three big ones is a bit much for a hypothetical threat. Can an active virus be derived from the vaccine? If so you'd have to watch the vaccine as well as the virus.

It came from the news, and is a combination of your exact thoughts. The jist is Big Pharma Company X was awarded $500 million for one million vaccines, with options for an extra 12 million vaccines valued at $1.5 billion. I'm not sure, but last time I check this wouldn't even cover the New York City metropolitan area.

Here is the actual source [in-pharmat...logist.com] which I found via this blog [thepeoplesvoice.org].

You can not reverse engineer smallpox from the vaccinia vaccine (smallpox vaccine). The virus is related to small pox, and in vaccinatio

And if it was the rare mars-dust-o-virus, I might agree with your sarcasm.

But here is something I'm not sure if you are considering. One, the virus didn't just magically appear. It came from somewhere, likely evolution or some animal born virus that crossed over to humans. But even if you go with the magical conclusion that it was create by GOD or a god or the devil or aliens, what is to stop that from happening again? Unlike the Mars-dust-o-notevenontheplanet-virus, this one is real and has been observed i

... on the "known" part. It seems like a fairly intelligent move to me. It is indeed a low probability scenario that someone will actually release smallpox as a biological weapon, but still the consequences of such an outlier would be devastating enough to warrant the adoption of such a policy.

It doesn't even have to be released as a weapon. Several years ago, a researcher was going through a bunch of American-Civil-War-era documents. Opened one envelope, and a bunch of smallpox scabs fell out. After that long, they weren't very infectious, so he didn't contract anything, but it's plausible that material from the 70s could have survived and remain dangerous. Which is why research into a better vaccine exists - since it's impossible to definitively prove that no smallpox material remains, it's wis

Don't see why this is news; it's not like the US is the only place with virus reserves. And, it'd be very difficult to develop a vaccine for a disease without samples to work with (unless we want to try and catch infected people and draw samples before they die, which would just increase the deaths).

Can't see how anyone besides the ultra-paranoid would see this as a problem, nukes pose a more significant and real threat than these stored samples...

The thing is, right after the summary says that the U.S. is preserving the last remaining known strains it says that Russia also has some that it is preserving. So, the U.S. doesn't even have the last known strains, the Russians are also known to have some.

Most likely some affluent middle-eastern or asian countries might have some samples as well. It's not like it's a huge issue but any of those countries (US included) can 'lose' or use a sample. If it does happen as is the case with any sort of biological warfare, many will die before you even get to know what the problem is, what the appropriate response is and the logistics of the response not to even talk about finding out who did it, where it started and why.

The problem with biological warfare is that, while it is very devestating, it is impossible to avoid significant risk of blowback on one's own civilian and military population. Even with recent advances in biological science, I think that the ability to reliably target a particular population without significant risks to other populations is still beyond the foreseeable future.

Who knows what is available in:- China- North Korea- Vietnam- Pakistan- your tin-pot despotic regime of choice

That's as good a reason as possible to maintain something to work with should some asshole with "nothing to lose" decide to let it loose on the world. Especially since it's now "eradicated" and other orthopox viruses are not nearly as prevalent as they once were (the first smallpox vaccines were derived not from smallpox itself but from a related human-transmissible disease,

Can't see how anyone besides the ultra-paranoid would see this as a problem, nukes pose a more significant and real threat than these stored samples...

Completely wrong.

Release one nuke, lose one city. Sucks to be that city, but in the grand scheme of things, no big deal. For example, no one really cares that we lost New Orleans unless they have/had friends and family there... On the other hand, release enough SP to infect just one person, we end up with worldwide uncontrollable epidemic, very very bad for every living human being.

Furthermore the venn diagram of people who are experts at military style guard duty and people who have nukes in the workpla

One person infected with small pox would not turn into a worldwide uncontrollable epidemic. We can make vaccines, we can close borders as much as possible (No a big fence is not possible, nor useful against those with access to ladders or shovel), and it just won't spread that fast.

Ahh now we're getting circular. We can make vaccines quicker if we have samples of live virus ready to go/grow.

It becomes a simple equation of how many more people will die due to delays in vaccine production, vs how much does it cost to keep it locked up, which frankly is probably pretty cheap, and really cheap when divided by X number of lives...

If a human life was only worth, say, $1000, then I'd say autoclave it and spend the security money on more profitable, traditional government responsibilities li

Won't spread that fast? All it takes is one infectious person on an international flight to spread it across borders. That's before they close any borders. There are constant reports of less serious outbreaks like measles [reuters.com] that infect hundreds of people because someone boarded a flight.

And as for no one caring....well, you might wanna rethink that. If not from a historical/cultural standpoint (the city IS older that the USA itself you know)...from a merely financial standpoint, you don't wanna lose NOLA.

It is the port city to the world off the MS river...a huge amount of product from the middle of the US ha

The issue is that Smallpox is a particularly contagious, particularly deadly virus.

The danger is that of accidental release, either through human error, or natural disaster, or even non-accidental release through malice or terrorism.

The argument against keeping it is that if we really needed to, we could reproduce it from scratch, like we did the 1918 influenza, because smallpox is fully DNA sequenced and we thus have the technology to bring it back, hence there should really be no need to store live sample

No, You _CANNOT_ recreate smallpox from DNA sequence. Not yet. There is a world of difference between simple viruses which have been assembled in the lab like the polyo virus and a smallpox virus. In fact there is a world of difference between a SmallPox virus and Flu.

The SmallPox virus is _BIG_. It is so big that it is on the borderline to defy the common assumption that viruses are not visible under microscope. It carries a whole battery of own enzymes which are essential for the initial cycle of the infection. We have not yet learned how to build all these with the correct glycosylation (they have glycosides sticking on them same as your average eucariote protein). We are not in a position to assemble it either. If we were, we could assemble a whole eucariote cell which is not anywhere near the current science level. Same level of complexity more or less.

In 10 years we may be in a position to build it from sequence. Now - not a chance.

If you RTFA, that's not at all what is going on here. (Supposedly) All governments of the world have either destroyed their stockpiles, or shipped them to the repositories in the US and Russia. Since that point, the UN has been pushing for the US and Russia to destroy their final (known) stockpiles. The US government has proposed that it hold off doing so for at least another five years (not centuries), during which it will spend another three billion on vaccine research.

Yes, and there's some international group that puts out a recommendation for keep / don't keep every ten years. The US and Russia both ignore the no keep recommendation and it generates a news article. Expect to hear about it again in 2021.

Yes but there are groups who wants to remind us that the U.S.A. isn't the model good guy. For some reason it gives these groups a feeling of self importance that they point out these things, they may not be able to feed and cloth the poor, or help improve the environment, or make anyones lives better, but they can do their part by showing that the United States of America isn't the Good Guy but a country out for its own self interest.

This is Data that will surprise only the United State Citizens who are n

I agree with your cynical viewpoint of these news articles, but I wouldn't say it's only in our own interest to keep the virus for national defense. Maybe that's one of the reasons that media latched onto, but it's not the only one. Research being preformed on smallpox is not limited in scope to smallpox vaccines, but virology in general. Keep in mind that smallpox was the first virus to have a vaccine developed. There is a huge body of literature and science behind smallpox, so, for example, watching f

What a load of crap. The US unilaterally got stopped developing biological weapons. The US is keeping this so it can develop vaccines if needed no other reason. The all the tin foil hated NUT CASES are just too stupid to figure out is that if the US really was going to keep Smallpox virus as a weapon they would simply LIE and tell everyone that they did destroy it. Really are people just so stupid that they can not even understand that it would be more likely that if the US was going to weaponise this they

over time, complacency will rot security, and over time, creative malintentioned individuals or organizations will exploit that. a smallpox outbreak would be like 10-100 9/11s or 10-100 fukushimas. destruction then seems preferable. you don't even need an actual smallpox virus to make a vaccine

but you are operating against human psychology: we aren't made to discard such power, even if the power is completely malicious

it may sound odd, but consider the lord of the rings, when humans had the chance to destroy the one ring, but chose to keep it instead. yes, its fiction, but all potent fiction is rooted in real human psychology, or such fiction wouldn't have any resonance or attraction to us in terms of storytelling ability. and with the lord of the rings we have valuable insight into how our own weaknesses and greed and lust for power hurt us in the long term

we won't destroy smallpox. and we will be hurt by that decision, many years from now

Or do you think Fukushima *caused* the earthquake and tsunami that was 10 times the size it was designed to withstand? Can we please stop ripping on the reactor that is surviving rather well compared to the design. If you tell me you can lift 100# and I give you a 1000# weight and then complain about how quickly your back snapped, is that fair?

And we don't need to "unleash the evil" of smallpox. There's a good chance that, somewhere out in a jungle somewhe

And we don't need to "unleash the evil" of smallpox. There's a good chance that, somewhere out in a jungle somewhere, is an animal carrying a variant of the smallpox virus (like cowpox) that will have a sudden mutation that allows it to pass to humans. If we don't keep these viruses so we can study them, then when that pandemic hits, you can add a x20 multiplier to the number of people who will die before a vaccine or cure can be developed.

QFT.

And where does anyone get the idea that smallpox released would lead to some worldwide extinction-type event?

We've faced smallpox before, before we had vaccines. Yes, it killed many people. No, it did not kill all or even most people.

Smallpox has a real world chance of being found in the world naturally.

It has been less than 50 years. therefore the chance of it coming back is possible. The best defense is to keep limited supplies available to make vaccines immediately which will be able to protect people right away as opposed to 6 months later after it has killed a whole bunch of people.

Vaccines take lots of time. If you want a million doses you have to plan 6-9 months out in advance. That is why some years the annual Flu shot comes

unlike SIV/ HIV or influenza which loves making species jumps, there are no natural smallpox reservoirs out there except us, other human beings. so it is genuinely dead in the wild

yes, there are related cousins to smallpox, like cowpox, but these diseases need to evolve into something like smallpox over an extended period of time, they won't simply spontaneously recreate smallpox in the wild

so insights into human psychology have no meaning to issues that are rooted in human psychology?

(!?)

yes, you are correct: many incorrect things are rooted in human psychology. but it is impossible to remove the human psychology from the equation. therefore you need to understand human psychology to understand the problem

or is your thinking you an magically snap your fingers and remove the human factor from policy decisions? and how the hell does that work?

you know its actually hard to get infectiousness and delivery vector just right. humans are puny in their ability to fine tune that. you need to stop basing your appraisals of human biotech ability on hollywood movies

however, mother nature is a much better laboratory for this purpose. SARS and swine flu are just a taste of things to come. mother nature abhors imbalance, and whenever a homogenous population gets too large within mother nature (which is what we are), then the other part of mother nature thinks "food that should be exploited". for our purposes, since no large carnivores threaten us, the threat is from the other end of the scale: the diseases that don't care about anything except reproducing, looking at us like a giant pristine smorgasbord, just waiting for exploitation. and, mark my words, some microroganism will crack that magical infectiousness/ delivery vector code someday, catch us unawares, and spread like wildfire. it's just a matter of time and probability. and our population is just too huge and dense to escape this corrective mechanism

In 1986, the World Health Organization first recommended destruction of the virus, and later set the date of destruction to be 30 December 1993. This was postponed to 30 June 1999.[73] Due to resistance from the US and Russia, in 2002 the World Health Assembly agreed to permit the temporary retention of the virus stocks for specific research purposes.[74] Destroying existing stocks would reduce the risk involved with ongoing smallpox research; the stocks are not needed to respond to a smallpox outbreak.[75] Some scientists have argued that the stocks may be useful in developing new vaccines, antiviral drugs, and diagnostic tests,[76] however, a 2010 review by a team of public health experts appointed by the World Health Organization concluded that no essential public health purpose is served by the US and Russia continuing to retain virus stocks.[77] The latter view is frequently supported in the scientific community, particularly among veterans of the WHO Smallpox Eradication Program.[78]

do you need a socket to manufacture a plug? do you need a screwdriver to manufacture a screw? same principle: we already have the vaccine, so we can copy it, without the original virus the vaccine is meant for needed

The problem is not those with declared stocks. The problem is that someone who isn't declaring it has some stored. Theyd be much more likely to do something untoward with it. And, if they do, then how would destroying small known stocks be anything but symbolism?

We're really early in the game of understanding the genetic basis of disease virulence. It's hard to say what may be useful in the way of organisms to be used in that kind of research.

Some emergent virus that uses some of smallpox's tricks may show up and we'd regret not having it available to study to better understand the new one.

Mankind has yet to invent event one "antiviral" that stops an infection from progressing, in say the way that antibiotics can stop a bacterial infection in it's tracks. Meaning that vaccines/inoculation are the only way to stop them -- via prevention, not cure. SO until a cure exists for even ONE virus, the world's most dangerous viruses need to have vaccines for them available.The point for keeping the viruses is that because mankind can't re-synthesize an active virus to test against, there needs to be

Then why can't I build my own machine gun, or go and buy several tons of explosives. These are likely to cause death to the owner or user but are illegal.

I distrust government probably more than most but even I find this to be a strech:

These are being kept in the event that *a* Government may need to "create" a way of culling the population in the future.

This is why big pharma is allowed to continue to "treat" major killers such as cancer and HIV/AIDS rather than cure, to ensure deaths, even if a cure already exists.

This is why big tobacco is allowed to use deadly pesticides on their crops, to ensure deaths.

This is also why alcohol is allowed to be legal, to ensure deaths, while marijuana will likely never be fully legalized, due to its inability to cause death.

If you think I'm being paranoid here, it doesn't take a genius to realize that resource management is a real problem for every Government in the world, and we are rapidly outgrowing our natural resources. Ensuring deaths continue to happen, however twisted that sounds, IS a viable option that they are exercising every day.

Since the smallpox genome was decoded and published in 2006, it is impossible to rid the world of the threat of smallpox.

The Vaccinia virus used in smallpox vaccinations is 95% similar to
smallpox (see http://www.nap.edu/html/variola_virus/ch1.html [nap.edu]). This
means that the base difference is 10,000 bases. This is only modestly
more than the 7500 bases assembled to synthetically recreate polio, which was also accomplished in 2006. You can order custom gene sequences of 1000 base pairs today at a cost of $1.30 per base pair.

A gene assembly lab, a sample of Vaccinia and a hundred thousand dollars can recreate smallpox today.

There is no other option but continue smallpox research for defensive purposes.

Uh, from a terrorist digging up a victim of the outbreak, or some other nations bio-weapons lab synthesizing it, or from it developing again from cowpox? Just because these are the only *known* samples doesn't mean they are the only samples in existence.

Do you know for a fact that there exists no other sources of smallpox in the world? Do you know that no country/organization other than the US/Russia has smallpox samples? Do you know that there are no remote, indigenous population that still carries smallpox? Smallpox has been eradicated from the developed world and most of the under-developed world, but no one can be sure it is completely gone.

...an outbreak that would start from where exactly? This logic seems a bit circular.

Not circular if you assume it'll be accidentally released by the other guys.

Also the general public naively thinks only two known storage means only two storage sites exist... How exactly do you know the French don't have one? Or some dude working on it in NYC in 1960 died in '61, and they're just now getting around to defrosting and replacing his research freezer? I've often wondered what happens if some dude who died on a glacier 1000 years ago gets defrosted, and someone downstream drinks the water...

Human bodies rot a lot faster than that. How many plague corpses could possibly still be around? If you do not bother with the American burial method, preserve the body and seal it in a metal tube, humans rot as fast as any other mammal our size. You would probably be lucky to find teeth from a plague victim.

Human bodies rot a lot faster than that. How many plague corpses could possibly still be around? If you do not bother with the American burial method, preserve the body and seal it in a metal tube, humans rot as fast as any other mammal our size. You would probably be lucky to find teeth from a plague victim.

Interestingly, they have recovered [wordpress.com] Yersina pestis DNA from buried 16th century plague victims. It would be at least theoretically possible to get smallpox DNA out of buried victims. Not easy, but within the technical reach of a moderately adept molecular biology lab. Of which there are many, many examples scattered about the planet.

They are the last known strains. That does not mean they don't exist in nature, or might not be uncovered in an archeological dig, or by a SCUBA diver or snorkeler finding some in a jar in a shipwrek, and an absolutely miniscule chance that there are viable viruses. Those are unlikely scenarios depicted in dramas on TV, but it isn't completely impossible that it could exist. Why not keep the one weapon we have against smallpox infection so cultures can be made to continue producing vaccines?

It might be a different strain, but it might also be easier to mutate a strain into it then to culture fresh sampled to be experimented on until a new vaccine is created assuming we don't forget how to make it for that specific problem.

One of the problems with collecting the virus when there is an epidemic is that your workers possess a serious risk of becoming infected too. So you need to set up some serious protections and pray for the best. It would go a lot quicker already having the strain in a workabl

How is it evil to hang onto some so that you can make a vaccination should an outbreak occur? Especially when you know that there are other stockpiles of this organism, the summary even says that the Russians have some.

They already have the weaponized strains and their vaccines, these are the wild strains they are talking about, only a really naive person would believe that they would talk publicly about the weaponized versions =)

No but I'm not naive in thinking someone else won't weaponize their samples. Remember the key word in the report is "known samples". I am not naive enough to think North Korea would announce they had samples and that they haven't already weaponized them.

First off, small pox would be a horrid biological weapon for an industrialize nation to use. We have better weapons and they can be control a hell of a lot more effectively. Small pox would be unpredictable in where the put break would occur.

Also, Small Pox came about through natural means the first time and i can do it again.

The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs. If an outbreak occurred people would be dying in the streets before you would even have enough samples incubated to start vaccine development and who knows how far it would spread before your vaccine is in full production. As is, with samples in secure locations you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the minute you are aware of the outbreak. T

>The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs

You're assuming that $FOE has the same strain as you do. Because if this was/really/ about eradicating smallpox and making vaccines, laboratories around the world would have all the same strains and share with each other.

No, the only reason to really keep these around is for offensive purposes.

>you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the mi

Hanging on to a microorganism that can kill millions is about as evil as evil gets. To the autoclave they should all go. Every last one of them. And anyone who defends the existence of smallpox as a weapon should have his head examined.

The problem is that the disease still exists outside of labs. Some victims were far enough north that they were buried in permafrost regions. Note that this fact has been the inspiration for numerous movies and tv shows. Also note that those concerned about global warming are also concerned about smallpox.

"The search for variola viruses surviving even longer was pursued in 1991 near Novosibirsk, Russia (9). "Bioweapons experts" searched for the variola virus in 19th-century smallpox victims mummified in

Or assuming there are no non-lab specimens. I do not consider it out of the range of possibility that someone excavating, say, a WW1 battlefield, could find the preserved corpse of someone who was infected with smallpox (We got samples of the Spanish flu virus that way) and thus put the virus back in the wild.

So the US and Russian Federation toast the stock they have. 5 years later the People's Republic of China or North Korea release a mutated weaponized smallpox that no one else has a vaccine for.

Does having a tiny bit of old smallpox in a vial somewhere give you a significant advantage in making large quantities of vaccine for new mutated smallpox?

According to TFS the US is ordering 14 million smallpox vaccine doses and I don't think they're relying on the current smallpox vials to make them. It seems to me that we could kill off smallpox but still be ready to produce vaccines if a new strain broke out.

Frankly, I think the odds and resulting damage of some nation hiding weaponized smallpox al

To be fair, as I posted above, it's actually options on $2.5 billion in reserve for 12 million vaccinations. I doubt they will 'exercised.' We are spending *only* $500 million on a million vaccines. Seems kind of expensive to me at $500 a pop. The award of this contract is currently under protest, so we'll see what happens.